Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (11 page)

IN THEIR RACE
to outdo one another, and to further sensationalize the story, journalists had been reporting Mae Crow’s death almost from the moment she was discovered in the woods. “
GIRL MURDERED BY NEGRO AT CUMMING
” the front page of the
Augusta Chronicle
had blared on September 9th, in an article that informed readers that “the negro’s victim died at her home near Cumming tonight.” The
Macon Telegraph
went further, claiming that when Ernest Knox attacked Crow, he “beat her into unconsciousness and then threw her over [a] cliff.” Once a single false report of Crow’s
death appeared in print, other editors felt compelled to follow suit, and a typical article in the
Constitution
closed by informing readers of the sad fact that “although every effort was made to save her life, [Crow] died late Monday afternoon.” By the beginning of October, interest in the story had grown so intense that the
Georgian
upped the ante, writing that Cumming was in an uproar over “the death of two white women at the hands of negroes.”

Meanwhile, Ellen Grice was alive and well out in Big Creek, no doubt busy with the work of running a household and a small farm with her husband, John, and keeping a low profile after all the trouble her allegations had stirred up. Mae Crow lay in her bed in Oscarville, watched and prayed over by her parents, Bud and Azzie, but still very much alive. In the first few days after she was found, Dr. John Hockenhull even told reporters “she will likely recover.”

For many locals, Mae became an object of fascination during her sickness, and at least two men were so desperate to get a glimpse of the beautiful, bedridden girl that they made a drunken pilgrimage. According to Azzie Crow, “when our darling daughter was living here at the point of death . . . one Sunday Wheeler Hill and another man came up to our house intoxicated.” Hill and his friend, Crow said,

wanted to see
what the negroes had done . .
. They hung around awhile, and before we knew it, they had gone to the back of the house . . . then pushed open the door and climbed up and were in the room where our precious daughter lay.

As much as they were offended by Hill’s intrusion, Bud and Azzie made it clear in a letter to the
North Georgian
that they were not opposed to the raids being waged in their daughter’s name and were as anxious as everyone else to be rid of “those fiends of hell, negroes.”

As September waned and as the first cold breezes rippled across the Chattahoochee, Mae grew weaker from her injuries, despite everything the doctors of the county had tried, and despite her mother’s prayers. At some point during the second week of her coma, Dr. George Brice told Bud and Azzie that their daughter had contracted pneumonia. On September 23rd, 1912—two weeks to the day from when she was first found in the woods—Mae Crow died.

MAE’S FUNERAL WAS
held at Pleasant Grove Church, a short walk from the house where she grew up, and in the center of a whole community of Crows. According to her schoolmate Ruth Jordan, the sight of Mae’s coffin being lowered into the ground was almost more than the white people of Oscarville could bear. “After she was buried it seemed like all hell broke loose,” Jordan recalled. Soon “the night was filled with gunfire [and] burning cabins and churches,” and the Jordans could hear whites “shooting at any black they could find.”

George Jordan and his wife, Mattie, were poor sharecroppers, like most other whites in Oscarville, but all her life Ruth had heard the story of how, when her mother’s mother died at a young age, “a black woman that lived nearby . . . became a mother-figure [to Mattie], teaching her to cook, keep house, and care for the younger children.” And so, as they listened to the crack of gunshots and smelled the smoke of distant fires, George and Mattie Jordan feared for their black neighbors.

At one point, Ruth’s father went out to check on an African American couple named Garrett and Josie Cook, who owned twenty-seven acres not far from the land George Jordan was working as a sharecropper. George told his wife that he was going out “to get news of the goings on,” but with gangs of night riders on the move, Forsyth had become dangerous even for a forty-four-year-old white farmer like Jordan. As he “walked down the road that night,”
Ruth remembered, “he was drawn on by a group of armed white men [and] it scared him so bad he came home.”

At first light, George Jordan walked toward Garrett Cook’s place. “Pa went to check on them,” Ruth Jordan said, and he found that their house “had been shot so full of holes that all the legs on the tables, chairs, and bed had been shot off.” When George called out, Garrett and Josie Cook finally emerged, having spent the night hiding in the woods:

Pa told this man to go back to his farm so the two of them could defend it against anyone that tried to take it from him. . . . The man replied, “George, that would just get us both killed,” and he left Forsyth County forever.

For days afterward, the Jordans could hear the sounds of the night riders each evening at dusk, and this went on “every night,” Ruth Jordan said, “until no colored was left.” Asked whether her father was ever challenged by locals for having tried to help his black neighbors, Jordan answered that to her knowledge “the subject was never again brought up by any of the whites involved.”

ISABELLA HARRIS, THE
eight-year-old daughter of Cumming mayor Charlie Harris, also remembered that September as a terrifying time, particularly once she learned that the night riders were not “mountaineers” from outside the county but gangs of ordinary white men, well known to all. Harris recalled that one day as she walked home from school in Cumming, “a group of men, part of a mob, passed me in the dirt side walk.” As they stormed past, Harris said,

They looked ahead of them, their eyes angry, their faces impassive with anger and determination. I was so frightened that . . . I climbed to the top of a rail fence and clung there until these men with their horrible faces had gone by.

Such mobs may have been on the other side of Du Bois’s “color line,” but they were far from strangers to the black people they terrorized in the weeks after Mae Crow’s death. When black residents like Garrett and Josie Cook woke to the sound of a rock smashing through a window or the jangle of bridles outside their door, the order to leave was usually delivered by men whose voices they had heard many times before: employers and landowners for whom they had plowed and picked cotton; merchants with whom they had traded; and white neighbors they had lived and worked with for years.

And whereas in early September, men from the church picnic had been bold enough to try to stand up to the white men pursuing Grant Smith, after the lynching, and in the wake of Mae Crow’s death, it didn’t take much to “run off” the few black residents still in the county. Joel Whitt, a local white man who was twenty-three in 1912, said that in the beginning, the night riders used gunfire and torches, just as Ruth Jordan remembered. But later, Whitt recalled, “Certain men would go to a black person’s home with sticks tied up in a little bundle [and] leave ’em at the door.” By late October, if you made such a thing and placed it outside the cabin of some last, proud black farmer, by sunup he and his whole family would be gone.

6

THE DEVIL’S OWN HORSES

E
ven as refugees flooded into neighboring counties, many residents bristled at criticism of Forsyth and offered a simple explanation for the “lawlessness” that was making headlines all over the state. A “violent element” had come from outside, they told reporters, and “but very few residents . . . participate in the demonstrations.” Asked about the makeup of the lynch party that had dragged Rob Edwards out of the county jail, one Cumming man claimed that “the members of the mob live in the hill country” north of Forsyth and came “from adjoining counties and the mountains.”

During the century that followed, generations of whites have continued to blame Forsyth’s recurring episodes of racial violence on “outsiders,” like when, in 1987, County Commissioner David Gilbert claimed that the men who’d attacked African American peace marchers were all from outside the county—despite the fact that seven of the eight men arrested had Forsyth addresses. “The real thing that upsets me,” Gilbert told reporters, “is that this whole thing was sprung by outsiders. It’s just a bunch of outsiders trying to start trouble in Forsyth County.”

The further one gets from 1912, the more frequently whites have
tried to deflect attention away from the county’s long history of bigotry by pointing to a specific group: the Ku Klux Klan. It’s easy to understand the appeal of such an argument, since it exonerates the ordinary “people of the county” from wrongdoing during the expulsions and implies that they themselves were the victims of an invasion by hooded, cross-burning white supremacists. The only trouble is that in the America of 1912, there was no such thing as the KKK.

WHEN PEOPLE HEAR
of that group today, the organization that comes to mind is actually the second incarnation of the Klan—the first having been stamped out in 1871 after the passage of the “Ku Klux Klan Act,” which enabled victims of racial violence to sue in federal court and gave President Ulysses S. Grant the right to suspend habeas corpus in pursuit of racial terrorists. Empowered by Congress to suppress Klan activity during Reconstruction, the U.S. Justice Department arrested and convicted many of the group’s earliest, most violent members. As a result, the Klan’s first grand wizard, former Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, was already calling for the organization to disband in the early 1870s, and by 1872 federal prosecutions had rendered the original KKK all but defunct.

For more than forty years after those original prosecutions, there was no Ku Klux Klan as we now know it. And when it was reborn, the “modern” version of the Klan came to life not in the woods and fields of the rural South but in Hollywood, where in 1915 D. W. Griffith’s film
The Birth of a Nation
portrayed costumed “white knights” as the defenders of white womanhood and the saviors of an idealized antebellum world. Griffith found inspiration for his night riders not only in the Reconstruction-era “Ku Kluxers,” but also in the romances of Sir Walter Scott, whose heroic highlanders burned crosses to summon their fellow clansmen to battle.

Griffith’s groundbreaking motion picture, based on Thomas Dixon Jr.’s play
The Clansman
, was pure fantasy, but millions of white moviegoers saw it as “history written with lighting,” as President Woodrow Wilson was famously—and apocryphally—said to have remarked when the film was screened at the White House. As
Birth of a Nation
took the country by storm, life began to imitate art, and when it opened at the Fox Theater in Atlanta in 1915, the streets around the movie house filled with men dressed up in sheets and pointy hoods, many riding horses draped in white cloth, like the heroes of the film. Once inside, moviegoers were mesmerized by a story of chaste white women being stalked by savage black rapists.
The Birth of a Nation
lit up movie houses with the most vivid fantasy of southern whites: a black rebellion, which in Griffith’s telling was both political and sexual. As the film’s mulatto villain Silas Lynch tells one of his white victims, gesturing out the window at rampaging black soldiers, “See! My people fill the streets. With them I will build a Black Empire and you as a Queen will sit by my side!”

But given that in 1912 Griffith’s film, and the birth of the second-wave Klan, still lay three years in the future, it is simply impossible that the black people of Forsyth were “run out” by gangs of white-sheeted Ku Kluxers. Groups of mounted men did appear out of the darkness and terrorize black families in 1912, but they were not robed “white knights,” and they did not wear pointy white hoods. Instead, Forsyth’s gangs of night riders were farmers and field hands, blacksmiths and store clerks, and, in all likelihood, even a few elected officials like Bill Reid. The whites of Forsyth didn’t need klaverns, kleagles, and fiery crosses to organize a lynching in the fall of 1912. All it took back then, as Ruth Jordan said, was “people of the county.”

If the mobs were not made up of masked Klansmen, just well-known local men “with their horrible faces,” it is natural to wonder
how those ordinary people first coalesced into gangs of night riders. How, that is, did a bunch of farmers decide to set fire to churches led by respected men like Levi Greenlee Jr. and Byrd Oliver, and to train the beads of their shotguns on the houses of peaceful landowners like Joseph and Eliza Kellogg? How did they summon the nerve to threaten the cooks and maids of even the wealthiest, most powerful whites in Cumming? Given that it required an organized effort, kept up not just over months but years, and given just how much will it took to sustain the racial ban for generations—from what source did all that energy come, and in what epic drama did these people think they were at last taking part?

THE LAND NOW
known as Forsyth County, Georgia, was once home to Cherokee people, who had lived there for centuries when James Oglethorpe and the first Georgia colonists arrived from England in 1733. As whites settlers pushed farther and farther west during the late eighteenth century, the line separating native land from United States territory was redrawn again and again, as one treaty after another was broken. By the early nineteenth century, the native people of Georgia were confined to an area in the northwest corner of the state known as the Cherokee Territory, which included present-day Forsyth.

The federal government had long sought to “civilize” the Cherokee, and in the first decades of the 1800s the native people of north Georgia were still hoping to live in peace with their new white neighbors. Around 1809, a Cherokee man named Sequoyah began developing the first written alphabet for his people’s language, and by the 1820s the Cherokee settlements in northwestern Georgia included Cherokee-built schoolhouses, Cherokee-owned sawmills and blacksmith shops, and vibrant cultural institutions like a tribal newspaper, the
Cherokee Phoenix
. Hollywood may have filled white
imaginations with visions of Indians living in tepees and hunting with bows and arrows, but by the late 1820s many Cherokee people in the Georgia foothills had lived alongside their white neighbors for years and were part of a racially diverse and increasingly integrated frontier community.